Free Energy Live In Action

Quantum energy generators (QEGs) may be the answer to the world's ever-increasing demands for power -- or not.

A nontechnical friend of mine recently sent me a post with the title "Free Energy Live In Action! This Is Breathtaking As Science Is Being Re-Written."

To his credit, my friend did not believe this and asked that I have a look and give him my opinion. I opened the link and got a page extolling the virtues of the quantum energy generator (QEG), which turns out to be the usual "motor driving a generator that drives the motor" setup, with a few bulky capacitors added for effect. The premise is that, once you start the device with mains power, you can unplug it, and the generator will continue to supply the motor and generate 10 KW of power for you, due to "resonance." That's quite a concept.

A very amusing video shows this machine being demonstrated in Morocco. Now, Morocco is hardly the center of the technical universe, but if you have read The Drifters by James Michener, you will know why Morocco is famous.

The video shows a geeky looking guy turning up a Variac (autotransformer), which gets the motor going and hence produces some very questionable power to five standard-sized domestic light bulbs. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but the biggest domestic light bulbs I have seen are 100 W, which means his load here was 500 W maximum -- nowhere near the 10 KW claimed.

For turning up the Variac, the guy receives a round of applause and hugs from most of the girls in the audience (who, I have to say, don't really look like the types you would select for a peer review of a new technology). Strangely, you never see him unplugging the mains.

The device has been given a nice name, the quantum energy generator. That seems very impressive, doesn't it? In the post, we find the following:

If you havenít heard of the QEG (Quantum Energy Generator) then this is going to be a nice surprise for you. This device is based off of Teslaís work where he built a resonance generator that required 1KW input to produce 10KW output.

Poor old Tesla; he must be turning in his grave. Maybe Tesla did produce a generator that gave 10 KW output for an excitation input of 1 KW, giving it 90% efficiency electricity wise, but it would have gotten a good deal of mechanical input from another engine of some sort.

Just above the Morocco video is a link to the open-source plans for the device. This link takes you to the page of a rather decorative lady who calls herself -- with some aptness, in this case -- HopeGirl ("Home of the fix the world organization).

HopeGirl starts off with a fairly correct summary of the workings of a generator:

A conventional generator needs 15KW to produce 10KW of power. To produce these 15KW of power we rely on gas, diesel, propane, coal or other products that can be metered creating profits for the oil industry.

So far so good, but then she goes on to say:

130 years ago Nikola Tesla invented and patented an energy generator. This is a resonance machine that only needs 1KW of input power to produce 10KW of output power. His patents are now in the public domain.

HopeGirl kindly gives us this link, which takes us to a set of PDF plans. These do look rather impressive -- a do-it-yourself generator, though a pretty standard-looking one. I don't understand why you would go to the trouble of making one rather than using a ready-made one. At the end of these plans is a copy of Tesla's patent. Strangely enough, this makes frequent mention of the steam or compressed air that would be the primary source of power for his generator. The gist of Tesla's patent, from what I can see, is using a resonant circuit in the generator, at a frequency similar to the engine's natural frequency, to stabilize the frequency of the power produced.

There are some more sources of amusement for those of us with a little understanding of electricity. The plans include a schematic:

As we see, the generator has four windings, two of which are "tuned for resonance" with some capacitors. The frequency is given as 400 Hz at the outputs at the left. These windings have a large number of turns, hence the high voltage capacitors in series to give a smaller (0.1µF) cap at 25 KV. However, the two windings appear to be connected in opposition, according to the dots on the windings. But let's be generous and assume that was a mistake.

The other two windings have one wire of each winding commoned to "neutral." The "live" ends of the windings are taken out, one directly to a 120V output and the other through an "Exciter" to the other 120V output. The Exciter consists of a tuned circuit with a spark gap across it (the schematics give a frequency of 1.3 MHz), but I am not sure about its purpose. This output is also fed back, with the neutral, to a DPDT switch, which switches between this output and a 240VAC mains input to feed (via the aforementioned Variac) a motor. In turn, this motor drives the generator. To start it, you use 240 V, but once it's going, the motor needs only 120 V?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Maybe Max the Magnificent would say this. When I saw the story title, I thought it was related to a colleague's idea for generating electricity from the skin to ambient temperature differential (which can go either way in Texas). His approach can generate microwatts from reasonable surface area (e.g. Samsung watch and band). But it uses the laws of physics, it doesn't make up new ones.

For those who read The Drifters (my dad gave it to me in high school), remember that a really bad thing happened in Morocco.

Aren't there laws against bad engineering analysis leading to poorly chosen investments of otherwise well intentioned charitors? For far less than $200K, they could hire a consultant like Mr. Ashton to debunk this! ;-)

IRIS?... because of an operational similarity to the iris of a human eye?

Well.. I'll bet you can, at least, say it five times fast without verbally stalling or laughing out loud. Just try that with a Wankel Rotary Engine!

... anyway, you can't blame the guy for trying something different.

But, as for the QEG... oh, no no no no!

It's...... yet another bunch of "Nullpunkt" people ( a future variant of "Steampunk", perhaps? ) invoking Zero-Point-Energy. And all in the name of Nikola Tesla? Please, no!

All ZPE means is that nothing in the whole-wide Universe, not even a vacuum, can ever have absolutely ZERO energy... intuitively, this all sounds very sensible and desirable... and, that this fact is iron-clad guaranteed from those residual quivering droplets of energy, at the bottom of the potential well, that are being produced as a by-product of the Uncertainty Principle.

( It's too bad that the money in our bank accounts doesn't work according to an equivalent principle. )

... however... what it doesn't mean is that there is, or ever will be, any practical way of getting a handle on all that energy, because it's everywhere.

And... at least we had all better hope that there are no DIY-accessible methods for producing Free-Unlimited-Energy!...... lest the outer crust of our planet should end up very soon joining the mantle and the core in assuming a nice-and-toasty glowing rosy-red color!

Sorry, Nullpunkers... but no thank you anyway. Utilization of a conveniently situated black-hole remains as my favorite grandiose energy-extraction scheme.

There are many suckers, apparently. One example I'll not forget is a radio interview program I heard, maybe 4 years ago now, about this internal combustion engine called the "iris engine." You can find several articles online, but it's much the same thing as your quantum generator.

Don't you know, it's 70 percent efficient, as opposed to 25 to 30 percent efficient. Why haven't we seen it in vehicles? Because of the petroleum lobby. Why is it so efficient? Here, this is also what the interviewee described in the interview (the two paragraphs below in italics are a direct quote):

The key element of the IRIS engine design (the brainchild of the IRIS executives' father, Timber Dick, who died in 2008) is a system of valves and vents that allows the combustion chamber to expand in diameter, rather than length. IRIS claims this expanding diameter means 70 percent of the surface area of the engine chamber can "react productively" to combustion, which is to say, by moving.

In a conventional engine, the company claims only about a quarter of the chamber's surface area is productive — the rest is passive.

So the guest on the show concluded that the iris engine would be 70 percent efficient. And horrors of horrors, the interviewer just drank the coolaid. Aaargh!

The obvious question SHOULD have been, "What is the maximum compression ratio you can achieve? Who says that 'working area' has anything to do with efficiency of a heat engine?" In fact, there is nothing in the Carnot cycle, in Boyle's law (P1V1=P2V2), in the gas equation (PV=nRT), all of which would be used to derive the max theoretical efficiency of a heat engine, that hints at "working area" playing a part.

On the other hand, compression ratio is the key. Given that pistons are great at compression, given that conventional ICEs already operate close to or at detonation, it seems unlikely that attempting to improve efficiency of an ICE by fussing with an irrelevant parameter. Not to mention, the iris design seems inherently less effective than pistons, at simple compression.

So, similar to your quantum generator. The obvious questions are never asked, and the hoax is allowed to perpetuate.